Housing minister Mark Prisk – who once proposed the full regulation of letting agents – says that a proposal to bring the industry into the scope of the Estate Agents Act would have created problems and not solved them. 

The number of new applicants seeking to rent in March was up 21% from February, with demand outstripping supply as the number of available homes to rent rose only 5%. 

Rich – and naïve – foreigners are being lured to buy new homes in London in a ‘feeding frenzy’, it has been claimed. 

Tenants are now staying in one property for 20 months, according to the latest research from the Association of Residential Letting Agents. 

Southampton tops the list of buy-to-let property hotspots with a rental yield of 7.82%, says HSBC. 

Massive growth and a sea-change in its structure lie ahead for the private rented sector, said housing minister Mark Prisk in a major speech. 

Housing minister Mark Prisk has announced the first successful bidders who will benefit from the £1bn Build to Rent Fund, designed to provide 10,000 new homes in the private rented sector by 2015. 

The proportion of owner-occupied homes in England and Wales has fallen to 64%, say new figures analysed from the latest Census conducted in 2011. 

An HMO landlord escaped with a lighter sentence because the court was not told that he had been convicted of similar offences just three months earlier. 

Rent levels have reversed a four-month downward trend, to stand 4.2% higher than a year ago. 

Housing benefit tenants looking for private rental properties have soared over recent months, with demand heavily outstripping supply. 

Smaller properties provide a better return than larger ones, with one- and two-bedrooms providing average yields of 6.8% and 6.4% respectively.